Save time surfing with RSS feeds

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2005. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

One of the problems with surfing the net is the length of time it can take to do it. Even with a fast broadband link, logging on to different sites about your favourite topics can take ages, and reading through the pages to find what’s new and interesting to you amongst all the dross and adverts can be a real pain. Luckily there are now several ways of speeding this up.

I noticed an ad for a BBC news alert program while looking on their news website. I installed the program, which only took a minute or so and was straightforward. The program consists of a little pop-up box that flashes up at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen should there be any breaking news. You can get it to play a sound but I have disabled this. During the London bombings it was popping up every 20 minutes or so, but it now only pops up every now and again with particularly interesting news.

I also came across lots of talk about RSS feeds. Not knowing what this was, I decided to look into it. RSS stands for really simple syndication. Essentially it is a way of a website giving headlines, with a link to the fuller story, to a program that will display them to the user.

These headlines can be anything from news to sale items to cartoons, and it is worth commenting that the feeds don’t have to be news. Some people have connected their blogs (diaries) to RSS and rather than having to log on to their site every day you will get their latest feed whenever they write it. One of my favourite sites gives you a different Dilbert cartoon every day. It is also worth mentioning that although a lot of feeds change daily, some can change from minute to minute, particularly when there is a lot of news. I subscribe to several BBC newsfeeds, PCW computer magazine feeds and the e-Health Insider feeds, which is enough for me.

The program that collects these headlines is called a newsreader. In the newsreader you tell it which feeds you want to keep track of. Some have built-in lists of popular feeds that you can select. However, all websites that use RSS will have a little RSS symbol that you can usually click on to tell your program to keep track of that feed.

The good news is that the feeds are usually free, as are most of the programs used to view them. The newsreader programs often look very similar to Outlook, in that there are different window panes with feeds in one, headlines in the next and links to the full page in the third. NewsGator is possibly the most well known and actually runs on the web in your browser. The good thing about this is nothing needs to be installed on your computer and you can access it from everywhere there is an internet connection. Some programs do run under Windows and it is easy to find numerous examples. I prefer one called Attensa for Outlook, which is a free add-on for Outlook that adds a mailbox similar to the inbox in which all your feeds go. Whenever you use Outlook you can also look at the news items, and in the preview pane you can see the whole article.

As if all this wasn’t enough, my favourite tool at the moment is the MSN screensaver. This is also available as a free download. After the length of time you have set, the screensaver will cut in and display any pictures you have on your hard disk. Over this, in a nice see-through window, any RSS news feeds you have subscribed to also appear.

If you were being adventurous and your practice has a website, consider having an RSS feed for it and asking your patients to subscribe to it. Whenever you had any news, say running short of flu jabs, they would get it automatically.